The Ten Most Overpaid Jobs In The U.S.

misbach writes "Here is what the 'compensation experts' have to say are the ten most overpaid jobs [original article at CBS MarketWatch]. 'Almost no one in America would admit to being overpaid, but many of us take home bloated paychecks far beyond what's deserved. 'Fair compensation' is a relative term, yet human-resource consultants and executive headhunters agree some jobs command excessive compensation that can't be explained by labor supply-and-demand imbalances.'"

Comments

trickle-down vs. flow-out

[lysium]

Since the money doesn't get spent, it simply vanishes from the economy. The truth is that trickle down would work, if the upper 1% spent all (or even most) of their money. Since they can't, trickle down is doomed to fail, as is the economy unless money starts flowing *out* of Eisner et al, and into the general economy...

This is why estate taxes originally came about. The government was extremely worried that a de-facto aristocracy would form out of the money that Industrialists were accumulating. So in order to prevent assets from endlessly collecting interest, they decreed that a large percentage of an individual's wealth would return to society upon death. This would also ensure that, at some point, SOMEone would have to work to bring more money in. Not exactly what one would call a fair system, but since Rockefellers and Kennedys do not own GE and Microsoft today, I would have to call it a partial success.

Now just recently estate taxes were repealed by the fiscal conservatives. Will this finally tip the scale to the point where wealth can endlessly create more wealth, so meritous, hard-working individuals like Ally Hilfiger can entertain us with their priviledge? Our children will find out!

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Re:I don;t know about 9

[StenD]

Huge investment? Next time you see a commercial airline pilot, ask him where he/she got their training and you will find that a majority of them will say either the Air Force or the Navy.

Only about half, actually.

Cost to former military pilot for training: Almost $0.00.

Aside from about 10 years of their lives, after training, with the added opportunity of being shot at.

And it's not like becoming a doctor-which IS a much bigger investment in time and money than training to become a commercial airline pilot after being trained in the military.

The military pays for medical school, too.

Re:I don;t know about 9

[delcielo]

I'm a flight instructor, and I'd like to respond to some of your post.

First, the fact that most accidents can be attributed, at least in part, to pilot error is no surprise. The word "most" implies a ratio. As the systems on airplanes become more reliable, and procedures more conservative, that leaves pilots who are getting both better and worse to make up the rest of the percentages.

Pilots are much more educated these days in subjects as diverse as aerodynamics, systems, physiology and crew resource management, etc.

At the same time, some of the skills previously taught are not now mandatory. The spins you mentioned, for instance. It used to be mandatory that you gave students spin training, and that CFIs (Certificated Flight Instructors) had to demonstrate spins to get their licenses. As your buddy's dad noted, however, there were more people being killed by the training than by accidents. I had a student inadvertantly enter a spin during slow flight who froze on the controls for roughly two turns until I was able to get him to let go. So I easily understand the now lesser requirements. Having said that, I and many others still give spin training. Most students stare agog at the rotating earth on their first spin rather than do anything constructive, so I think it's unfair not to get them through that initial "shock and awe" before sending them out into the world where, as shown above, they might enter that situation inadvertantly.

So we're growing them smarter; but at the same time, we may not be arming them with everything we used to. Having said that, spin training isn't necessarily useful to a DC-10 driver.

As for aircraft design... you can build airplanes that are very stable, very smart, very fault tolerant and forgiving, etc.; but every piece of that perfect airplane adds complexity and problems of its own. For instance, the Airbus that crashed at the Paris airshow because the computer entered "land" mode and wouldn't allow the pilot to exceed certain parameters in his go-around attempt. In 1994(?) there was a Fed-Ex DC-10 crew that was attacked by a disgruntled employee who struck all 3 crewmembers with a framing hammer. They disabled him by initially performing a split-S maneuver that no computer would have allowed. The attacker wanted to fly the airplane into the Fed-Ex hub in Memphis and would likely have succeeded if the pilot had been unable to fly the airplane beyond its operational parameters. History has many more such stories of times when doing something the airplane wasn't supposed to do saved the day. You don't want a computer to control everything. There needs to be context for actions; and currently, only humans can really analyze that.

Also plan on getting rid of anything smaller than a passenger jet, if you're going to require the same systems that those high-end airplanes carry. They're simply not feasible in terms of weight and price for smaller airplanes, though that is slowly changing.

In the Sioux City crash, the pilot was using differential thrust from the engines to control the airplane. If you increase thrust on the right wing, it travels a bit faster and produces more lift, which causes it to raise a bit and the airplane to turn. The sweepback angle on the wing enhances this also, as the forward wing (the one on the outside of the turn) is effectively longer than the other wing. (That's a lot easier to illustrate visually.) Anyhow, the Sioux City incident is a perfect example of how necessary the pilots are.

Finally, I know of jobs that pay a lot less and are more demanding on average. For instance, the dishwasher at your local restaurant works a lot harder day in and day out than the airline pilot who flew you to Cleveland last week. The reason we don't pay the dishwasher 100K per year (aside from the now exorbitant $1000 price for chicken-fried steak) is that there won't ever be a dishwashing emergency that will cost the lives of hundreds of people if not dealt with in the next 20 seconds.